Clavain was taller and thinner than Xavier, so it took some creativity to both dress himself and not feel that he was taking anything particularly valuable. He retained the skintight spacesuit inner layer, slipping on a bulging high-collared vest that looked faintly like the kind of inflatable jacket pilots wore when they ditched in water. He found a pair of loose black trousers that came down to his shins, which looked terrible, even with the skintight, until he found a pair of rugged black boots that reached nearly to his knees. When he inspected himself in a mirror he concluded that he looked odd rather than bizarre, which he supposed was a step in the right direction. Finally he trimmed his beard and moustache and neatened his hair by combing it back from his brow in snowy waves.
Antoinette and Xavier were waiting for him, already freshened up. They took an intra-rim train from one part of Carousel New Copenhagen to another. Antoinette told him that the line had been put in after the spokes were destroyed; until then the quickest way to get about had been to go up to the hub and down again, and by the time the intra-rim line was installed it could not take the most direct route. It zigzagged its way along the rim, swerving and veering and occasionally taking detours out on to the skin of the habitat, just to avoid a piece of precious interior real estate. As the train’s direction of travel shifted relative to the carousel’s spin vector, Clavain felt his stomach knot and unknot in a variety of queasy ways. It reminded him of dropship insertions into the atmosphere of Mars.
He snapped back to the present as the train arrived in a vast interior plaza. They disembarked on to a glass-floored and glass-walled platform that was suspended many tens of metres above an astonishing sight.
Beneath their feet, thrusting through the inner wall of the carousel’s rim, was the front of an enormous spacecraft. It was a blunt-nosed, rounded design, scratched, gouged and scorched, with all its appendages—pods, spines and antennae—ripped clean away. The spacecraft’s cabin windows, which ran around the pole of the nose in a semicircle, were shattered black apertures, like eye-sockets. Around the collar of the ship where it met the fabric of the carousel was a congealed grey foam of solidified emergency sealant that had the porous texture of pumice.
“What happened here?” Clavain asked.
“A fucking idiot called Lyle Merrick,” Antoinette said.
Xavier took over the story. “That’s Merrick’s ship, or what’s left of it. Thing was a chemical-rocket scow, about the most primitive ship still making a living in the Rust Belt. Merrick stayed in business because he had the right clients—people the authorities would never, ever suspect of trusting their cargo to such a shit-heap. But Merrick got into trouble one day.”
“It was about sixteen, seventeen years ago,” Antoinette said. “The authorities were chasing him, trying to force him to let them board and inspect his cargo. Merrick was trying to get under cover—there was a repair well on the far side of the carousel that could just accommodate his ship. But he didn’t make it. Fluffed his approach, or lost control, or just bottled out. Stupid twat rammed straight into the rim.”
“You’re only looking at a small part of his ship,” Xavier said. “The rest of it, trailing behind, was mostly fuel tank. Even with foam-phase catalysis you need a lot of fuel for a chemical rocket. When the front hit, she went clean through the carousel’s rim, deforming it with the force of the impact. Lyle made it, but the fuel tanks blew up. There’s one hell of a crater out there, even now.”
“Casualties?” Clavain asked.
“A few,” Xavier said.
“More than a few,” said Antoinette. “A few hundred.”
They told him that suited hyperprimates had sealed the rim, with only a few deaths amongst the emergency team. The animals had done such a good job of sealing the gap between the shuttle and the rim wall that it had been decided that the safest thing to do was to leave the remains of the ship exactly where they were. Expensive designers had been called in to give the rest of the plaza a sympathetic face-lift.
“They call it ‘echoing the ship’s brutalist intrusion,’” Antoinette said.
“Yeah,” said Xavier. “Or else, ‘commenting on the accident in a series of ironic architectural gestures, while retaining the urgent spatial primacy of the transformative act itself.’”
“Bunch of overpaid wankers is what I call them,” Antoinette said.
“It was your idea to come here in the first place,” Xavier responded.
There was a bar built into the nose cone of the ruined ship. Clavain tactfully suggested that they situate themselves as unobtrusively as possible. They found a table in one corner, next to a cavernous tank of bubbling water. Squid floated in the water, their conic bodies flickering with commercials.
A gibbon brought beers. They attacked them with enthusiasm, even Clavain, who had no particular taste for alcohol. But the drink was cold and refreshing and he would have gladly drunk anything in the current spirit of celebration. He just hoped he would not spoil things by revealing how gloomy he really felt.
“So, Clavain . . .” Antoinette said. “Are you going to tell us what this is all about, or are you just going to leave us wondering?”
“You know who I am,” he said.
“Yes.” She glanced at Xavier. “We think so. You didn’t deny it before.”
“You know that I defected once already, in that case.”
“A way back,” Antoinette said.
Clavain noticed that she was peeling the label from her beer bottle with great care. “Sometimes it seems like only yesterday. But it was four hundred years ago, give or take the odd decade. For most of that time I have been more than willing to serve my people. Defecting certainly isn’t something I take lightly.”
“So why the big change of heart?” she asked.
“Something very bad is going to happen. I can’t say what exactly—I don’t know the full story—but I know enough to say that there’s a threat, an external threat, which is going to pose a great danger to all of us. Not just Conjoiners, not just Demarchists, but all of us. Ultras. Skyjacks. Even you.”
Xavier glared into his beer. “And on that cheering note . . .”
“I didn’t mean to spoil things. That’s just the way it is. There’s a threat, and we’re all in trouble, and I wish it were otherwise.”
“What kind of threat?” Antoinette asked.
“If what I learned was correct, then it’s alien. For some time now, we—the Conjoiners, rather—have known that there are hostile entities out there. I mean actively hostile, not just occasionally dangerous and unpredictable, like the Pattern Jugglers or Shrouders. And I mean extant, in the sense that they’ve posed a real threat to some of our expeditions. We call them the wolves. We think that they’re machines, and that somehow we’ve only now begun to trigger a response from them.” Clavain paused, certain now that he had the attention of his young hosts. He was not overly concerned about revealing what were technically Conjoiner secrets; in a very short while he hoped to be saying exactly the same things to the Demarchist authorities. The quicker the news was spread, the better.
“And these machines . . . ?” Antoinette said. “How long have you known about them?”
“Long enough. For decades we were aware of the wolves, but it seemed they wouldn’t cause us any local difficulties provided that we took certain precautions. That’s why we stopped building starships. They were luring the wolves to us, like beacons. Only now we’ve found a way to make our ships quieter. There’s a faction in the Mother Nest, led—or influenced, at the very least—by Skade.”
“You’ve mentioned that name already,” Xavier said.
“Skade’s chasing me down. She doesn’t want me to reach the authorities because she knows how dangerous the information I hold is.”
“And this faction, what have they been doing?”
“Building an exodus fleet,” Clavain told Antoinette. “I’ve seen it. It’s easily large enough to carry all the Conjoiners in this system. They’re planning on evacuating, basically. They’ve determined that a full-scale wolf attack is imminent—that’s my guess, anyway—and they’ve decided that the best thing they can do is run away.”
“What’s so abhorrent about that?” Xavier asked. “We’d do the same thing if it meant saving our skins.”
“Perhaps,” Clavain said, feeling a weird admiration for the young man’s cynicism. “But there’s an added complication. Some time ago the Conjoiners manufactured a stockpile of doomsday weapons. And I mean doomsday weapons—nothing like them has ever been made again. They were lost, but now they’ve been found again. The Conjoiners are trying to get their hands on them, hoping that they’ll be an additional safeguard against the wolves.”
“Where are they?” Antoinette asked.
“Near Resurgam, in the Delta Pavonis system. About twenty years’ flight time from here. Someone—whoever now owns the weapons—has re-armed them, causing them to emit diagnostic signals that we picked up. That’s worrying in itself. The Mother Nest was putting together a recovery squad which they, not unnaturally, wanted me to lead.”
“Wait a sec,” Xavier said. “You’d go all the way there just to pick up a bunch of lost weapons? Why not make new ones?”
“The Conjoiners can’t,” Clavain said. “It’s as simple as that. These weapons were made a long time ago according to principles which were deliberately forgotten after their construction.”
“Sounds a bit fishy to me.”
“I never said I had all the answers,” Clavain replied.
“All right. Assuming these weapons exist . . . what next?”
Clavain leaned closer, cradling his beer. “My old side will still do their best to recover them, even without me. My purpose in defecting is to persuade the Demarchists or whoever will listen that they need to get there first.”
Xavier glanced at Antoinette. “So you need someone with a ship, and maybe some weapons. Why didn’t you just go straight to the Ultras?”
Clavain smiled wearily. “It’s Ultras we’ll be trying to take the weapons from, Xavier. I don’t want to make things more difficult than they already are.”